Drama

The Peloponnesian War drags on and on with no end in sight, and the tough-minded Lysistrata has had enough. Taking matters into her own hands, Lysistrata convenes a meeting of women from warring city-states across Greece and calls for a sex strike....

Shakespeare's most sophisticated comedy is a riotous tale of hopelessly unrequited passions and mistaken identity....

In the hands of Sophocles, the master dramatist, the anguished tale of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother retains its power to shock and move beyond any Freudian reference....

Four classic comedies from one of the wittiest playwrights in Western literature....

Eight of George Bernard Shaw's most memorable plays in one splendid collection....

Antigone is a famous Greek tragedy attributed to the ancient playwright Sophocles at around 440 BCE. The play expands on the Theban legend of Oedipus that predates it, dealing with Antigone’s burial of her brother Polyneices in defiance of the law....

In this BBC full-cast production of Much Ado About Nothing, some handsome soldiers return from battle. Yet one soldier finds himself locked in a merry war of his own....

The final play of the Oresteia, called The Eumenides (Εὐμενίδες, Eumenídes), illustrates how the sequence of events in the trilogy ends...

There’s something Constance Middleton’s friends are dying to tell her....

George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion is a fussy unmarried professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who claims that he could train an uneducated person off the street to speak so that he or she could pass as a member of the aristocracy. His pick is Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers....

In this classic of Chekhov’s canon, an overbearing professor pays a visit to his country estate, where Sonya and Vanya, his daughter and former brother-in-law, have slaved to maintain his wealth....

Six phenomenally sophisticated Noël Coward comedies: Fallen Angels, Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Blithe Spirit, Present Laughter....

Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s most compelling Roman plays. The plot against Caesar and the infamous assassination scene make for unforgettable listening....

Goethe’s two-part dramatic work, Faust, based on a traditional theme, and finally completed in 1831, is an exploration of that restless intellectual and emotional urge which found its fullest expression in the European Romantic movement....

Professor Esolen who has served as your guide through both the Inferno and Purgatory will guide you through the profound and elevated poetry of Paradise....

Oedipus the King is the story of a man whose life is destroyed by his own good intentions. When a terrible secret from his past is brought to the light of day, the consequences are chilling....

Sophocles' The Theban Plays, all three of which are included in this collection alongside adaptations of Electra and Philoctetes, are brought to life by celebrated writers, poets, and playwrights....

Brilliantly manipulative and entirely amoral, the hero-villain Richard is one of Shakespeare's greatest roles....

The Folger Shakespeare Library, home to the world's largest Shakespeare collection, brings Julius Caesar to life with this new full-length, full-cast dramatic recording....

In Richard III, Shakespeare invites us on a moral holiday. The play draws us to identify with Richard and his fantasy of total control of self and domination of others....

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies....

In Sophocles' tragedy, Oedipus discovers that he has been caught in his terrible destiny....

This final play from the pen of Oscar Wilde is a stylish send-up of Victorian courtship and manners, complete with assumed names, mistaken lovers, and a lost handbag....

A tender love story, a serpentine villainess, a glittering setting in London society, and a showering of Wildean witticism....

Inspired by the mythic house of Thebes, Sophocles’s defining Greek tragedies follow the fates that befall three doomed generations....